[theforum] evolters outline

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Wed Aug 13 10:58:16 CDT 2003


OK, we've had a bit of a bash around this on #evolt (wanna come join?) 
and this is an outline we've come up with.

What it is
~~~~~~~
It's a service that hosts applications that provide community-building 
tools for evolters. Most of these are actually delivered through 
member-only content types. List below...

Members will be able to host their stuff easily and we can build nice 
things like community blogs (ie an evolters' travel blog, aggregating 
all the travel blog posts of members. Sabrina's just called this 
BetterThanBlogs)

What it is not
~~~~~~~~~~
Essentially, a meo replacement. It's not experimental space to develop 
in. It will provide a rigidly restricted set of tools.

Why would I use it?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(as opposed to having a site of your own with it on)
Well you might (and might not - not everyone has access to a CMS), but 
it's
a) easy to use (it will be!)
b) turnkey
c) community building with other evolters
d) and you're helping evolt.org

What does it cost?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Given the different things that people can do for us, and the different 
value of money around the world, it's going to be mad to charge a flat 
fee. Also, some people contribute in time, not money, and that's also 
OK. My only concern is that payments by paypal be lumped into something 
that's not going to get a large %age skimmed by Paypal. But the 
contribution needs to be regular.

Also, there will be some kind of free initial period as it won't work 
until we have a critical mass (mmm Metcalfe's law)  - choices are:
1) Until X date
2) Until X members
3) A rolling X days after you sign up

Services/Content types List
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1) evolters.org email address - forwarded, not hosted, but with 
spam-tagging en-route
2) Blog. Members can also tag entries with keywords (see 
BetterThanBlogging below) which can drive sub-blogs
3) Links. Kinda part of the blog thought, but needn't appear on blogs.
4) Photo gallery - upload pics by FTP and it's all done including 
thumbnails and next/previous
5) Recipes - resurrecting the old feo idea. Actually, this fits into 
BetterThanBlogging
6) Resume/CV
7) Wikis
8) Personal general pages - can be submitted to workflow and become weo 
articles
9) Jabber server tied into the global login
10) BetterThanBlogging(tm)
BTB is just an aggregated blog of all the evolter blogs. So you can see 
what evolters.org as a community is thinking/writing about. Using the 
keywords mentioned above, you can also then do topic-specific blogs, 
like the evolter travel blog for next time Isaac & Kate go 
world-gallivanting.

Obviously users can choose whether an entry appears or not (sounds like 
a workflow state to me), so your post about dildoes doesn't appear in 
the travel blog unexpectedly (unless you were travelling *to* a dildo 
convention, in which case you'd have both keywords and appear in the 
dildo blog too *grin*)

You could also have an RSS feed for external evolter blogs, but I'm 
less worried about that.

I think that's where we got to. Any additions/deletions/modifications?

cheers
Martin
--
Now playing on iTunes: "Last Of The Teenage Idols" by The Sensational 
Alex Harvey Band from 'Delilah' - a hit from way back in 1973 



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